


Truth is stranger than my own worst dreams

by impossibletruths



Series: weary and worn are our sad souls now [3]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Gen, Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-01
Updated: 2016-11-01
Packaged: 2018-08-28 11:23:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8443984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impossibletruths/pseuds/impossibletruths
Summary: Percy falls, and he does not get back up. Percy's death and resurrection in the daemon AU.





	

**Author's Note:**

> After like, a zillion years I'm posting daemon AU stuff to ao3. All daemons and explanations can be found [here on my tumblr](http://teammompike.tumblr.com/tagged/daemon-au).
> 
> Title from "Meet Me In The Woods" by Lord Huron.

She collapses next to him, among the chaos and noise and glass and blood, and he knows it’s over.

It’s a quiet feeling, realization. Certainty wraps around him like a blanket, so heavy it smothers him, but comforting too. For a heartbeat he sees everything through clear eyes, a world trapped in amber, thick and heavy and still.

He sees Keyleth curled at his feet, Feldarios watching over her with something akin to fear as she pushes herself to exhaustion to feed him just enough healing energy to keep him standing; sees Grog holding his own against a woman his size and her boar of a daemon; sees Vex, high and far away, and some small and desperate part of him breaths a sigh of relief to see her out of harm’s way; sees Scanlan weaving half a dozen tricks together to make something that might be nearly enough; sees Vax, barely, a blur of shadow and feathers among the glass.

He sees Ripley standing across the chasm of glass and ash, monkey daemon upon her shoulder, clever fingers fisted in the cloak, simian mouth split in a cackling laugh as Percy fires, fires, fires.

He sees Athanasia, bloody and beaten at his shoulder, fallen from the sky to be with him before they go, and he knows in his bones that it is over. He knows it same way he knew when they had settled, the same way he knew when Orthax broke them.

He knows it the way he knows they cannot be fixed. He knows it the way he knows the weight on their shoulders is their own to bear.

He knows it the way he knows he can live with that.

It seems he will die with it, too.

He meets Ripley’s eyes across the battlefield, and Athanasia digs her feet into the padding of his coat, and he and Ripley are alone in the world––there is blood, and bullets, and glass, and the two of them, and of course it would end like this. It has to.

“No matter what today, I forgive you,” he tells her, voice steady above the cracking of glass and the black-powder bang of her (his) guns, and he feels something that could almost be peace. “But I cannot let you leave.”

Then there is shadow, and pain, and nothing at all.

* * *

Keyleth sees Athanasia flicker, a here-gone-here flare of gold, particles drifting and snapping back together, and she does not believe her eyes when mere seconds later she disappears again, a shower of shimmering dust. She waits for the punchline.

Then Vex screams, and Athanasia does not come back, and Percy does not groan and push himself to his feet, and there is no punchline.

Afterwards, there is… there is fear. Desperation. Numbness. Ripley dies bloody and muted and ripped asunder and it does nothing to fill the growing emptiness within her.

They must get him to Pike, but she must sleep first, and sleep is… It is a long night.

Eventually, heartbreak gives way to exhaustion, and her eyes close. Feldarios perches on the table above, regal and proud in the faint light, and watches over Percy.

Good, Keyleth thinks, before darkness and dreams swallow her up. Someone should stay with him, while his daemon cannot.

* * *

Feldarios does not watch alone that night. While their people sleep, heartsick and frightened and desperate, the daemons keep guard.

Oraman sits at Percy’s head, tail flickering as he stares unblinking at the man, except when he ducks his head to let Ilmariel clean his face, half familiar and frantic.

Khav couches in the center of his chest, still as stone except for the intermittent flutter of wings. She sits, and watches, and dares the darkness to come any closer.

Ilmariel scuttles around the table all night, heartbreak bleeding into bursts of action, as if anything might change as she flits from daemon to daemon. She tries to see to all of them at once, and they let her fuss, comforted ever so slightly by her frantic care.

Terre stays silent, round eyes blinking slowly as she stares not at the body before them but rather at the complicated tangle of limbs below, Vox Machina clinging to each other as they weather the night. She does not miss Grog’s eyes glinting in the dark, or Vex’s too-quick breathing as she pretends to rest. She sees their sleeplessness and stands guard against the dark as best she can. Percy is not the only one who needs an extra pair of eyes. She is rather old; she can watch over the young for one night.

* * *

In the small hours of the morning, when even Vex cannot keep her eyes open any longer and the mess of limbs smooths out into something that is not peace but is almost rest, Khav says, “Pike should be here.”

They are the only words spoken all night.

* * *

(Kynan’s daemon, a lean, ragged-looking hound with her tail tucked firmly between her legs, curls tight against him as they watch the watchers, shame hot and heavy in their bellies as they intrude upon this fragile grief that they have had a hand in causing. They do not sleep either.

It is a long, long night in the confines of the mansion.)

* * *

Miro meets them at the Sun Tree, and the skin-prickling strangeness of a daemon alone barely registers among their grief.

“Where is she?” Vex asks, tears down her face, and Miro says, “Waiting.”

Pike meets them at the temple door, dark circles under her eyes that match their own, and none think to question it. “I knew something was wrong,” she says, hand fisted in Miro’s coat as he stands next to her. “Where is he?”

“Can you do something?” asks Oraman as Grog ducks into the temple, Khav flitting down to bump against Miro’s damp nose.

Vex asks, “Can you help him?”

“We’ll try,” Miro promises, and Pike’s fingers dig deeper into his ruff, as though she could hold on tight enough to steady the world. Miro’s weight is heavy against her leg.

“We’ll do everything we can,” Pike promises as Grog lays him upon the table. He looks so young and fragile. A whine hums in Miro’s chest, and she chokes down her own tears.

They will do everything they can, and hope it might be enough.

* * *

In the end, three offerings are made. They are all different, but they are also the same.

They are all heart.

* * *

Vex offers hers freely, with a kiss and an answer to a question unasked and desperate, silent prayer that it not be too late.

Oraman sits at Percy’s head, tail snapping back and forth, and Vex says, “It’s yours,” and he does not hesitate to lean down and press his head beneath the man’s still chin, whiskers rubbing against an unshaven jaw, and for a moment the temple is silenced by the enormity of the gesture, by the raw-heart truth of it.

* * *

Pike offers all of theirs together, the heart of this small family they have built from the cracked pieces of themselves, which cannot be whole without him.

She offers it with her faith, offers intervention for a man on the path towards redemption who has faltered and fallen. She offers a prayer to pick him up, dust him off, set him right. She offers hope.

Miro sits at her side as she works, weaves the strands of need and want and love into a single prayer, and She does not come but warmth fills the room, and the lights flicker, and as one Miro and Pike bow their heads, and they burn bright and beautiful, and their goddess is with them.

Side-by-side, gold and still, they seem something divine, and not mere flesh and blood.

* * *

Keyleth’s offers hers with words. She bends the brittle, awkward things in her mouth to her will as she speaks. She talks to him as one person to another, a girl to her best friend, and also as a leader in her own right beneath the trappings of a wanderer, and does not accept refusal. Cannot accept refusal.

Feldarios sits at her shoulder, and they are fierce and wild and free, and the half-built shell of a building cannot contain them.

She calls forth crows, and Vax offers his wings, _like the crow he is_ , and they think of a quick-witted soul with a crest of pale feathers, and Pike clenches her fist and drags something down, down, down to this plane and this room and this body, and they wait with bated breath as a sunburst shines through the bare bones of this temple of healing and redemption.

The crows are gone when the light fades, and Percy sinks back onto the cracked and broken table, an empty shell, and they are silent like the tomb in the face of this failure.

Except.

Except one crow remains, feet click-click-clicking on the split table, and she turns her head, stares them in the eye one by one, Vex and Pike and Keyleth, and barks out a short, sharp caw, and like sparking a fire Percy’s chest jumps, and he sucks in a breath, and another, and another, and Athanasia tilts her head the other way and runs her beak through his pale hair, the smallest of gestures, and the wave of relief that washes through the room is strong enough to drown them.

* * *

“Thank you,” Athanasia says to her, later.

“For what?” asks Keyleth. The crow stares at her with piercing eyes, and she tries to pay no mind to the shock of white slowly bleeding from her crown, dark feathers already bleaching to white.

“For dragging me back. For saving us.”

“It wasn’t just me.”

“No,” agrees Percy’s daemon. “But you gave me form again. It was so easy to forget, you know. I knew what I was, but I couldn’t remember how to be.”

“Oh,” says Keyleth, who does not understand the making and unmaking of souls, who has not lived it, who has only been a stepping stone along the way. Maybe, if she is very unlucky, she will understand one day. “Um. I’m glad it worked.”

“Yes,” says Athanasia. “Me too.”

She drags her beak through Keyleth’s hair, a familiar gesture and swoops off into the night, a splash of shadow against the dark sky, and Keyleth stares after her, and hopes to the gods she had no faith in that this trial is over.

As if it would be so easy.

**Author's Note:**

> Daemons:  
> Percy - Athanasia (carrion crow)  
> Keyleth - Feldarios (gyrfalcon)  
> Pike - Miro (golden retriever)  
> Vex - Oraman (black cat)  
> Vax - Ilmariel (red squirrel)  
> Scanlan - Terre (bullfrog)  
> Grog - Khavmaria (eurasian hornet)


End file.
